Research Initiation: Exploring Epistemologies where Engineering Meets Art

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Recently, the combination of engineering and the arts has been championed as an effective educational model for training future engineers. The diverse ideas and skills required from combining engineering and art encourages creative student thinking and opens new, non-traditional pathways into engineering. New domains of engineering such as computer graphics, 3D printing, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction require engineers to work with designers, visual artists, and humanities scholars for their science and technologies to have societal impact. Engineers need not just technical skills, but social awareness and communication skills to effectively work across these domain boundaries of art and engineering. Through combining engineering and art curriculum, these needs are addressed in a meaningful way. These programs typically feature an extensive collaboration or design project for students in engineering and the arts to interact and work with one another. However, much research has pointed out the difficulty of these interactions between participants due to the diversity of viewpoint, background, and skills. This project aims to understand theories of knowledge that students utilize in a collaborative engineering and arts environment. This will help develop a better understanding of the nature of interactions at the boundary of art and engineering. Insights that emerge from this work promise to improve the educational experiences of engineers interacting in these programs and foster new, diverse and inclusive ways of working for the engineering workforce. This project is a comparative study of two subsets of students at Arizona State University: (i) a group of engineering and arts students pursuing a year-long design/capstone project from the transdisciplinary School of Arts, Media and Engineering; and (ii) a contrasting group of engineering students pursuing a year-long senior design project in a traditional Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering School. Through analysis of these student's experiences, researchers answer a series of research questions on the range and depth of epistemological beliefs held by participants in both populations, and any similarities and differences among the participants. In addition, through discourse analysis of language and terms used by participants and of observation notes of working groups, researchers reveal philosophical viewpoints and how these viewpoints affect communication, offering insight into effective collaboration between engineering and the arts. The intellectual merits of this proposal include generation of fundamental knowledge into the epistemological viewpoints and interactions in art and engineering learning environments and conceptual frameworks of personal epistemology in education. The broader impacts of this project include pedagogical material for transdisciplinary engineering and media arts courses, public outreach and participation through the Center for Science and the Imagination, and participation in the Digital Culture Summer Institute to introduce a diverse set of middle and high school students to engineering and the arts projects.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.